Retailers are being squeezed by high commodity prices, high transportation costs, high labor costs, and the high cost of advertising inside and outside of their retail centers. Retailers now, more than ever, are having their profit margins decimated by events far beyond their control. Importantly, retailers, which control their own retail space, need to optimize use of that space in ways that include keen shopper understanding. Such shopper understanding is costly to obtain and is often incomplete. For example, the collection of shopper buying habits is known to be acquired at the point of sale. Such data collection is widespread and fails to provide granular insight as to a shopper's behavior, namely the reasons a shopper chooses a particular product for purchase. Today, retailers do not have a system with the ability to gain shopper insights at the point of purchase decision. The only known method of gaining a shopper's insight at the point of purchase decision is by hiring one or more persons skilled and trained at conducting focus group testing to follow shoppers in their retail store which is costly in both time and personnel resources.
Grocery stores are among those hardest hit, since their profit margins are often no more than one to two percent of a store's total sales. Currently, stores boost their profit margins by selling shelf space within the store like real estate. To increase the price of shelf space in stores and to encourage a greater variety of products within stores, stores need to provide vendors of wholesale products with a more effective and influential way of selling their products to the store's shoppers. Stores need a way to offer vendors effective systems and methods to influence shoppers at the first moment of truth when the shopper first encounters the product, allowing the vendors and retail establishments to sell more products. Vendors will pay premiums to stores employing such systems and methods.
Shoppers, too, are feeling the pinch of ever escalating commodity prices like crude oil, corn, and others. As a result, shoppers have become increasingly cost conscious of their monthly food bills. Yet, today's modern lifestyles do not provide shoppers the luxury of time to spend searching and cutting out coupons or other saving mechanisms typically offered by retailers. Therefore, shoppers need a way to make shopping easier, quicker and cheaper.
Retailer's currently use many elaborate in-store displays on aisles, end caps, shopping cart and shelves to seize the shopper's attention and influence product selections before, during, and after a shopper's product consideration. These convoluted attempts to get a shopper's attention are often ignored by shoppers who often attempt to get out of the store, as fast as possible, completing the task of shopping while talking on their cell phone or other personal handheld devices. In fact, prior art attempts to get shopper's attention at targeted locations are expensive, inefficient, ineffective and annoying; often decreasing the retailer's profit margin and increasing the cost which is passed through to the shopper.
Retail establishments need a low-cost, highly effective method for responding to and influencing a shopper's product selection and decision-making based on their location within a retail store. Such a method should aim to enhance, simply and expedite a shopper's experience with very little, if any, cost pass-through to shoppers and very little, in any negative impact to a store's profit margin. The retailer's need has been met by one or more embodiment's described below and will be explained with greater detail and particularity below.